What is this thing? This hunger that is also a glass shard in the throat? To love, to be loved—it is a neutral necessity, as vital as the breathing I do without noticing. It is a fragility so heavy it crushes the chest. In the silence of the room, between one blink and the next, I feel this longing weaving itself into my pulse. It is not a feeling; it is a force. It is the prehistoric vibration of being human.

I am looking for the core. Beyond the pretense, beyond the mask of the face, there is a raw desire to simply be toward another. It is a wild simplicity. To shed the fear is to lose one’s skin; it is a painful birth into the light. We are not beautiful; we are merely reaching. And in that reaching—the hand extended in the dark—is the sudden, terrifying joy of the “is.” We exist. That is the miracle and the horror. We are together, and for a moment, the silence is not empty.

©️ Beatriz Esmer